Friday, August 24, 2012

AVWW Post-Release 1.207 "Double Lightning" Released!

This one is the next in our series of adding a new spell and other new tweaks each week while the game is undergoing its art revamp for the next few months.

There are really a lot of good things in this one. For one, the new spell is just made of awesomesauce: it's easily my favorite spell ever, just for the visual effect alone. But it's also really fun to catch multiple enemies in your cloud of lightning when you can. zebramatt suggested the idea as a fire spell, but since other players were pointing out the lack of air-element spells I thought this one would do well to fit both needs at once.

Next up we have yet another 100 rooms thanks to Benmiff. He. Is. A. Machine. It's no question now that well over half of the room maps in the game are now created by him; it might be closer to 2/3 of them now, I'm not sure. And we had hundreds to start with!

The name "double lightning" for the post comes about because of Lightning Storm (the new spell mentioned above) plus lot of heavy changes to Lightning Rocket. Mainly it now moves way faster and drains the mana faster also. That makes it sort of like a super mega jump, rather than a slow ride upwards. Boy oh boy, is that fun. Ulrox really had a great idea with those changes, it's almost like a new spell.

Next up are a variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks, the majority of which seem to either involve Pyrrhic or Misery or both. Huge thanks to both of them, and all the other players involved as well. The gift-giving interface is now way less hard to find as part of these changes, and perhaps what might be the most significant change of this release despite all the great stuff above:

The percentages of what seeds in stash rooms is now vastly improved.
The little pointless bits of shards, and the extra enchant-charge
containers (both of which can be found elsewhere plenty easily) no
longer seed. The overall density of the good items has more than
doubled as part of these changes

More to come next week. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.